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The notion of “concept” and the concept of “class” plays a central role in Marx’s and Marxist analysis of society and human activity. There is a large body of study about concepts, their formation and development, which has been made, in great extent, by Soviet psychologists from cultural-historical tradition that have been inspired by works of Lev Vygotsky. Yet, the achievements of the scientific works of these scholars have not been fully incorporated toward developing an epistemological-philosophical theory that aims at a proper understanding of concepts. Evald Ilyenkov is one of the major figures that has undertaken this task and has made great contribution to a Marxist philosophical theory of concepts and conceptual systems. Yet, his early tragic death has left his task unfulfilled. This paper is an attempt toward a first step of furthering and deepening Ilyenkov’s philosophical analysis of concepts. To this end, Marx’s concept of class will be analyzed with the use of Ilyenkovian approach to concepts. The paper attempts to show that contradiction is an essential aspect of conceptual and real development. It also aims at showing that the contradictory nature of concepts, on the other hand, reveals the normative aspect of conceptual activity: concepts and thus conceptual systems are not only contradictory but also normative. Normativity is a necessary aspect of conceptual development in that it put concepts into work, that is, it facilitates the resolution of contradictions that are inherent in reality and thus causes development of both the real and the conceptual realms; this development will reveal itself in form of a new, higher form of contradiction.

Documentary on Frantz Fanon. Before Amos Wilson,Frances Welsing, Joy DeGruy, and countless others, Fanon wrote studied and articulated our modern day colonial existence which still goes on. Very interesting comments on interracial relationships, and the Original Woman’s rejection of the Original Man

ABSTRACT: All our higher mental functions are mediated processes, says Vygotsky (1986), and signs are the basic means used to master and direct them. But how can this be if our words and other signs work only in a purely representational, ‘picturing’ fashion, for they still need interpreting as to their meaning? The ‘inner observation’ problem remains unsolved. Our significant expressions must also work on us in another way: by the living expressions of others producing spontaneous bodily reactions from us. Thus the relation between thought and language is not to be found in patterns discoverable in transcripts of already spoken words, but in the dynamic influences exerted by our words in their speaking. Vygotsky (1986) speaks of our utterances as having an affective-volitional intonation in their voicing, while Bakhtin (1993) talks of them as having an emotional-volitional tone. This means, as I will elaborate in my talk, that not only it is possible to possess a transitionalunderstanding of ‘where’ at any one moment we are placed in relation to another person’s expressions, but to possess also at that moment an action guiding anticipation of the range of next ‘moves’ they may make. Thus, as I see it then, thinking and consciousness is a socially responsive elaboration of our animal sensitivities to, and awareness of, events occurring in our relations to the others and othernesses in our surroundings. Thus, far from it being a special, private, inner theater or workshop of the mind, its emergence depends completely on the dynamical intertwining or intermingling of our ‘inner lives’ with the ‘inner’ lives of those around us. This view of thinking chimes in with Goethe’s [1749-1832] views quoted below, as well as with his account of a special kind of thinking he calls exact sensorial imagination. In this view, our thinking and consciousness becomes no more strange to us than the fact of our ‘livingness’ – a fact that is at once both ordinary, in the sense of being very familiar to us in our daily practical lives, as well as being quite extraordinary to us in our intellectual lives, due to the current inappropriateness of our academic modes of thought and talk. My talk, then, will be just as much concerned with an exploration of the move away from mechanical modes of thought to those appropriate to living processes, as it will be about thinking and consciousness.

‘There is a strongly musical element in verbal language. (A sigh, the intonation of voicein a question, in an announcement, in longing; all the innumerable gestures made withthe voice.)’ (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.161).

‘The child’s self-motion, his own gestures, are what assign the function of sign to theobject and give it meaning‘ (Vygotsky, 1978, p.108).

Traditionally in the social and behavioral sciences, seeking a single, unified, orderly account of things, we have spoken and written about ourselves as disembodied, isolated, self-contained individuals. We think of ourselves as existing in a fixed world of objects that we come to know, primarily, in a visual-intellectual manner, through our observations of them. As such, we have assumed that we can only come to know our own true nature in such a world by our empirical testing of our possible representations of it for their accuracy. However, unlike computers and other machines, as living, embodied beings, we cannot be wholly indifferent to the world around us. We must, to an extent, continuously react and respond to it, spontaneously, whether we like it or not, and in so doing, we must of necessity, relate and connect ourselves to our surroundings in one way or another.

Below, influenced both by Wittgenstein and Vygotsky (as well as Volosinov and Bakhtin), I want to explore the consequences of us talking of human activity from within a new vocabulary that takes our living, embodied nature seriously, from within what I shall call a relational rather than an individualistic way of talking. For, just as the child, ‘with the help of the indicative function of words,… begins to master his (sic) attention, creating new structural centers in the perceived situation (Vygotsky, 1978, p.35), so we also, as investigators, can draw our own attention to otherwise unnoticed features of our own conduct, through the introduction of a new vocabulary, a new way of talking.

Commentary on the Chapter by RichardBarwell, “Heteroglossia in MultilingualMathematics Classrooms”

Mathematics classrooms are sites of encounter for different voices, perspectives, and ideas. Those differences become even more visible when the object of difference is language. In his chapter, Barwell draws on Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia to explore the tensions that underpin multilingual classrooms. He enquires about how those tensions influence the teaching and learning of mathematics and the implications that they may have for equity in mathematics teaching. In my comments, I would like to dwell upon the question of language in the mathematics classroom and on some issues about equity.

1 Language in the Mathematics Classroom

One way or another, for one reason or another, since the time of Babylonian schools, institutional educations have always faced the question of linguistic diversity. However, the manner in which this diversity has been addressed and understood has not always been the same. Contemporary schools seem to be led to address this diversity along the lines of contemporary concerns about equity and social justice. These concerns, of course, are a token of social and political interests in coming to grips with cultural diversity, brought forward by unprecedented migratory movements of a global scale.

Rossi-Landi elaborated such concepts as linguistic production, linguistic work and linguistic capital in social reproduction, identifying homological relations with material production. These concepts describe factors that are fundamental in today’s social reproduction cycle as also emerges from the circulation of such expressions as ‘immaterial resource’, ‘immaterial capital’ and ‘immaterial investment’ in linguistic usage today. All this is accompanied by awareness of the importance of education, information and specialized knowledge for development and competition in present day knowledge society. Until recently material production and linguistic production, that is, manual work and intellectual work, were thought to be separate but related homologically at profound genetic and structural levels. The novelty is that in the world of global communication linguistic and material production have merged. The computer has united hardware and software in a single unit. The connection between work and material artefacts, on one hand, and work and linguistic artefacts, on the other, is now obvious such that the superior capacity of linguistic, that is, ‘immaterial work’, is also now obvious. Linguistic work leads the processes of production and development.Leer más…

Cultural-historical psycholinguistics addresses language activity in its socialas well as in its psychological function with corresponding verbal forms. Language is thus situated within the life activity of situated and positioned, mutually oriented societal individuals, it is not abstractable from these individuals, nor from their activity. This notion of language is at the core of theproposed ‘psycholinguistics of alterity’ (Bertau 2011), constructed firstly through a historical and conceptual analysis, secondly in a theoretical way involving empirical results from diverse fields of language investigation. The aim of our contribution is to introduce the main elements of this construction, we will hence follow the same rationale. In a first step, Humboldt’slanguage philosophy and its reception by Russian linguists is addressed. Dialogicality of language and thought processes is the core notion which is taken up and developed in Russia and in the Soviet Union by several thinkers. Vygotsky’s specific language psychology is seen within this context of ideas, constituting the framework for considering the relation between languageand thought. Building on Humboldt’s philosophy of language, Russian dialogical linguistics and cultural-historical psychology as formulated by Vygotsky,the theoretical system addressing language as activity of socially organized and self-other positioned individuals is presented in a secondstep.